ABSTRACT
Perhaps no single event in the history of the American Negro has more engrossed the attention of social students than the 1916-24 migration of Negroes from the South to the North. Not that great population movements are rare phenomena in the history of modern industrial society, or even in the life of the American Negro, himself, who since emancipation has changed residence in the Southern States to a degree highly commensurate with the contingencies that have arisen in the economic order. A statistical investigation of the movements of the American population as a whole shows that these peripatetic impulses focalized in the Negro population by the recent migrations cannot be isolated as if of a purely racial nature; but are to be considered an incidental wave of motives underlying the universal trend of modern population towards urbanization which responds sensitively to the demands of modern industrialism and the innovations in its technology. 1
